So, been a couple of weeks since I had the B8. Genuinely happy with it - it's completely removed the banding and dirty screen effect I hated about my last LED tv, and the light bleed issues that ruined dark scenes is completely gone.

However, I am finding watching some shows, live TV for the most part, motion is a little janky. I'm still trying to find a sweet spot on the Trumotion settings to reduce the stuttering while not introducing too many artifacts and pixelation to the screen.

Regarding blacks, I'd have put myself in the "don't really care about blacks" camp with my old LCD TV. I always though it looks fine. However, after buying a Samsung KS7000 initially and seeing just how bad blacks were with HDR content it completely changed my mind. Once I got my OLED I realised just how big a difference it makes. Even SDR content can look almost HDR-like, not in terms of peak brightness, but in terms of just how impressive the contrast is.

Not dismissing the concerns about burn-in or relatively low peak brightness, but overall I've found the switch to OLED a bigger jump than the jump to either 4K or HDR. It really was that impressive.

Pierre2k wrote:
Regarding blacks, I'd have put myself in the "don't really care about blacks" camp with my old LCD TV. I always though it looks fine. However, after buying a Samsung KS7000 initially and seeing just how bad blacks were with HDR content it completely changed my mind. Once I got my OLED I realised just how big a difference it makes. Even SDR content can look almost HDR-like, not in terms of peak brightness, but in terms of just how impressive the contrast is.

Not dismissing the concerns about burn-in or relatively low peak brightness, but overall I've found the switch to OLED a bigger jump than the jump to either 4K or HDR. It really was that impressive.

Pierre2k wrote:
Not dismissing the concerns about burn-in or relatively low peak brightness, but overall I've found the switch to OLED a bigger jump than the jump to either 4K or HDR. It really was that impressive.

Yep. Coming from someone who's always had a problem with the black levels since the LCD revolution, this is my summary too. I would certainly take the modest peak brightness in exchange for the better blacks all day long.

I'm sure I'm overthinking the burn in stuff, but I'm going to want to keep this TV for a lot longer than I've kept my older ones so I'm just being pro-active. It really is trivial to switch picture modes, and if you're the sort to invest in a TV like this you should arguably be switching between picture modes anyway depending on the content. Certainly at least between standard and cinema, and probably sport too (where frame interpolation is more desirable).

Again the "dim HDR game mode" on the older ones is practically a non-issue. You just crank up the in-game brightness slider.

I wrote a long and boring assessment of what's going on there on AVForums. I'll quote it here if anyone is bothered, but go ahead and skip over it if you're not interested:

The reason that the game mode is dim is because until the 8 series, the LG OLEDs didn't support dynamic tone mapping in game mode.

Dynamic tone mapping is the set's ability to adjust a HDR source to fit within the capabilities of the TV. If a game is mastered to 4000 nits for example, and our TVs can only do up to 1,000 nits or so, dynamic tone mapping is designed to adjust the image on the fly so it still looks 'right' within these new parameters.

Without dynamic tone mapping, and our example of a 4,000 nit game, the luminance of the entire image is simply scaled down 4x, so that it fits within a 1,000 nit container. This means the entire game becomes 4x dimmer than it's designed to be.

A very good example of this apparently is the Goodfellas UHD BR. It's supposedly mastered to 10,000 nits, although not one part of the movie ever tries to be that bright. 99.99% of the movie occurs within the 1,000 nit range, but without dynamic tone mapping, the film would actually be 10x dimmer than it needed to be for no real reason (of course this shouldn't really come up because you wouldn't need to use game mode to watch a movie, it's just an example).

I suspect that the older firmware, and the PC mode fix we've discovered, are using a very basic form of tone mapping to re-brighten the image, at the expense of introducing artifacts. This is why LG clearly aren't recommending it.

Like I've said repeatedly though, in the vast majority of games you just need to crank up the in-game brightness setting to sort it out. In HDR games, what the slider should be doing is manually tone mapping the image by reducing the peak brightness that the game is targeting. By moving the slider up you should be able to 're-master' that 4,000 nit game as a 1,000 nit game, which fits perfectly within the range your TV supports and the image looks fine again.

Unfortunately some games screw this up and the brightness option operates like it does in SDR games and just washes out the image. There's no real excuse for this, it's a bona-fide cock up by the developers. Sometimes there's no brightness slider at all. Both of these situations are very rare, but what you can do if you want to is set the screen to PC mode to brighten the image, at the expense of visual artifacts. Or if you want to you could simply turn HDR off in-game and forget about it.

So should LG go back to the old game mode? I think not. These TVs clearly do not have the ability to dynamically tone map the image within 21ms. The old game mode and the new PC mode are plainly 'cheats', which is why they aren't perfect to look at. I do think they should offer the fix as a new picture mode though for simplicities sake. But really, this entirely falls at the feet of the game developers and platforms. They have chosen to use HDR10 which has a static luminance level built into it. If they are then going to master their games at 4,000 or even 10,000 nits (which no TVs are close to achieving yet) they should absolutely be offering a simple option for the player to adjust the setting. I think Sony and MS should be insisting on this during the certification process.

TL;DR

Use the in-game brightness settings to un-dim the image. This isn't a cheat, or a dodgy fix, this directly and elegantly addresses the issue that's causing the dim image.

If the game doesn't have a working brightness slider, you can engage PC mode to brighten it, but it WILL either introduce visual issues, or add additional input lag (this is based around the YUV setting coming from the console). You definitely shouldn't use PC mode as a simple catch-all solution, it is much preferable to use the brightness option if there is one.

Or you can turn HDR off for this particular game. Blame the developers for this, this is their screw up! There have been a few instances of developers patching in better HDR adjustments post-launch at least.

(Incidentally I half suspect that the "OLEDs are dim in general" nonsense comes from people who have turned off DTM on their non-game modes too, since it's buried under the dynamic contrast setting)

On the 7 series you had to put dynamic contrast on low to activate it but I understand it's its own setting now, but perhaps play with these two settings to see what looks right on your B8? Don't take it above low for any reason though.

RawShark wrote:
So, been a couple of weeks since I had the B8. Genuinely happy with it - it's completely removed the banding and dirty screen effect I hated about my last LED tv, and the light bleed issues that ruined dark scenes is completely gone.

However, I am finding watching some shows, live TV for the most part, motion is a little janky. I'm still trying to find a sweet spot on the Trumotion settings to reduce the stuttering while not introducing too many artifacts and pixelation to the screen.

Anyone got any tips?

So, motion processing was the reason I *was* prepared to spend an extra few hundred bucks on the C8.

What I find (still with the C8 but nowhere near as bad as my '16 OLED) is that the amount of brightness you have exacerbates this.

It also seemed to get better over time with my 2016 model.

I have had no end of fucking about with Trumotion settings and finished up with it switched off, but using the RTINGS suggested settings (even though they're for movies really)

The stutter is actually as a result of OLEDs having a near instant response time. Other panel tech with lower response times look smoother in motion because the frames blend together.

So really the stutter you're seeing is actually the TV displaying your content at precisely the refresh rate it's being fed, but you're used to seeing frames slightly blended together. It's at the exact opposite end of the spectrum as old LCDs where we'd complain about excessive ghosting or motion blur.

The only options are to get used to it or to use some degree of frame interpolation (which I personally don't recommend - maybe for sports).

It's important here to distinguish stutter from judder. Judder is similar to the frame timing issues that DF like to talk about; namely the frames aren't being updated on a regular basis. If you're seeing judder it should be fixable, because all OLEDs support all the major refresh rates - again with near perfect response times.

However what could be a problem is when you're relying on a broadcaster or STB to handle the motion up/down scaling. For example if you're watching a movie on live TV, something, somewhere has upscaled a 24hz movie to 50hz before it reaches your TV. Similar story I imagine if an American 60/30hz show has been scaled to 50/25hz. This is just conjecture but if the broadcaster/whatever has done this job badly, your instant-response-time TV is probably going to throw a spotlight on any judder that's already in the broadcast material. Not a great deal you can do about that, again other than frame interpolation if that's your bag.

On the other hand if you're seeing judder on your 24fps Blu-Ray, you've probably cocked a setting up somewhere. Make sure the player knows the TV can do 24hz, and make sure that Real Cinema is enabled. Apparently you can also improve results by turning on TruMotion but setting both de-blur and de-judder to 0. I haven't tested that but if it works I expect it's forcing the TV to deliver frames at the right cadence without actually doing any TruMotion processing. I'm not sure why it wouldn't be doing that anyway but there you go.